


straight down the line

by encroix



Category: Gilda (1946)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-14
Updated: 2014-09-14
Packaged: 2018-02-17 08:14:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2302763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/encroix/pseuds/encroix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's always been on the level with the two of them.</p><p>Always.</p>
            </blockquote>





	straight down the line

She isn't Gilda when he meets her.  
  
Later, the story will slip off her tongue smooth as honey - _gilda, you can talk or dance, but you can't do both_ \- that even he forgets what's truth and what isn't. The truth is that it's after the crash and before the war, that liquor is running heavy out of bathtubs and into the streets, that he learns what the weight of lead is when it's hot.  
  
She isn't Gilda then; he isn't Johnny yet either. He's too much a kid, still wet behind the ears.  
  
When they meet, she's draped in gold lame, flashy in the light, with bright red lips and dancer's legs that seem to go on past the point of decency. His expression's a little too transparent, and he can't stop himself from eyeing her.  
  
One of the other hired guns beside him elbows him hard then, and whispers, _she's jimmy's_.  
  
She smiles at him; they make introductions; years later, and he can't remember the name he gave her.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
There's a lesson to be learned in Atlantic City: great men aren't born, they're _made_. And the only people that make them are themselves.  
  
The first night he spends there cleaning up for Jimmy, the casino lights are lit all the way down the boardwalk, and he and Pinky strut down the path, trying not to look like the out-of-towners that they are. It's Pinky's first kill, and the kid looks faintly nauseous with all of it, even though he's trying not to let it show.  
  
Most of this part of the city - the eastern part - are Jimmy's, if only in part. He's got his name attached to a couple of the buildings that look like palaces, bright and opulent and full of people too willing to throw their money away for the chance at winning.  
  
Jimmy even lets him hold the dice for the craps game once before the casino opens - glossy and red with white dots, heavy in the hand. He tries a roll and gets nothing but snake eyes.  
  
Jimmy's laughter is overloud, and the man thumps him once hard on the back.  
  
 _you make your own luck, kid_ , he says, and Johnny nods, and reaches for the dice again. Feels their weight, tests them in the palm of his hand. Blows on them once before throwing them again.  
  
Snake eyes.  
  
(And that's the day he learns that there's no such thing as luck. There's only cheating, or being cheated. Winning or losing.  
  
Gambling's an idea that only works for suckers, for the kinds of people that believe that anybody owes 'em a win anywhere.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Gilda returns.  
  
Less bright, less shiny this time around, with a heavy scent of cigarette smoke around her and a taste for bourbon. Pinky and some of the other boys talk about Jimmy knocking her around.   
  
Gilda doesn't say anything.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Want to know if a sucker's a real sucker?  
  
She comes to him in the middle of the night, mouth smelling of whiskey and stale smoke, and talks about working at one of the burlesque joints that Jimmy owns. _there's no use in talking about the men_ , she sighs over another tumbler, and he starts to think about the kinds of men in those kinds of places, and how stirring a pretty face can be when it's looking at you all wide-eyed and pleading.  
  
He was a chump then. Might be a chump now. Doesn't change the facts.  
  
She leans on his arm and she's halfway through another drink - and who knows what number drink that is of her night? - and her eyes are wide and glazed from the alcohol. Her mouth opens and she sings. It's not a song he remembers - something in Spanish - but it sounds pretty all the same.  
  
He pats her arm and she scoffs, reaching for her glass and draining the rest of it. He pats her arm, and she recoils; that's all you need to know about the nature of the beast.  
  
 _i used to dream about getting out of here_ , she says, with a glance behind her shoulder.  
  
And like the sucker he is, what does he say?   
  
_i can get you out_ , he says, or he thinks, as if it makes any difference.  
  
She turns back to look at him and there's something softer in her face. The first time he really sees the person that she's built, deceptively gentle with that lilt in her voice that wraps itself around _i need you_ and traps you.   
  
He can't remember if that really happens or if he's invented it, but either way, he knows it wouldn't really make a difference.  
  
  
  
  
  
(there's something in the good book about his particular brand of chump, something about a dame and a snake leading some guy out of paradise, but he never took to studying those kinds of things that closely. you don't when you're bound for a life as bad as the one he's living.  
  
still, years later, part of him thinks that if only he hadn't been so stupid and cockeyed then, if only he'd thought to see ahead, he might have been a king like jimmy. just for a day.  
  
  
  
  
kings are still important. even if they get gunned down in alleys behind the butcher shop on 18th and 10th. even if the buildings get shuttered for racketeering.  
  
even if there's nothing left of you but your name. at least, for a while, jimmy had that.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They were young. It was early.  
  
He spent too many nights teaching her the weight of cards, and how to shift your thumb against the top card to deal, too many nights watching her try to teach him the steps to her dances, watching her dress and undress, watching her cake on her makeup. It was early - before he made her stop dancing, before he started seeing the end of the tunnel everywhere he looked, before they fell apart.  
  
Instead there was just the line of the side of her body in the dark, and the soft laugh she had that always seemed like it was just for him. She used to talk nonstop in those moments after, when he was still buried inside of her and just beginning to soften, as if she thought that if she could fit every secret, every careless remark that doomed them, every spare bad thought into the space of that moment, it didn't count.  
  
He'd brush her hair away from her face with the tip of his finger and forget every time he'd thought that leaving her was the only decision, every time that he thought that she had ruined someone else's chance at greatness, every time that he wondered about the kinds of men that pawed at her through her tight dresses when she went to work.  
  
 _there's no one else but you_ , she said.  
  
And he buried his head against the crook of her neck and sighed her name like it was any kind of answer.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They end the way they started: he's looking at nothing and trying to piece together a future, and she's staring at the chips.  
  
  
  
  
(He doesn't believe in looking back.  
  
There's a packed bag and somewhere between two hours and two days where he thinks about writing her a note.   
  
  
  
  
He doesn't.  
  
He's an asshole that way. Not that she's ever known him as anything else.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He thinks it's over.  
  
It isn't over.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The second time starts with this: no past, all future, and bright shiny possibilities for fleecing all sorts of people in the Argentine. You couldn't make it any better than this.  
  
He finds a benefactor; he builds a new start; he drinks enough bourbon to wipe the image of her from the back of his head.  
  
(None of it works.)  
  
He keeps imagining the sharpness in her eyes when she sees the room, cleared of everything that he owned; keeps seeing all the hours he spent with her teaching her the little things he knew (cold reads and picking locks, lying and walking away), keeps seeing her splayed out on the bed, her hair loose and spilling across her bare shoulders, reaching out for him.  
  
  
  
  
The second time around, she's a different Gilda.  
  
Harder now with a kind of cruelty in her eyes that he hasn't really seen before. That he placed there.  
  
Part of him feels a thrill at that. A little piece of empire that starts with her heart.  
  
The other part of him blames her. Blames her for finding him, blames her for finding the Jimmys in his life that could king him, that could give him any kind of life that was better than schilling at the bottom, blames her for making him love her so much that sometimes he thinks about what it'd be like if he hadn't left.  
  
She hates him, that's sure, but no more than he hates her.  
  
He won't be bested. Not by anyone.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The second time around, she bites him when she kisses him. Catches his lip between her teeth and pulls just hard enough to hurt.  
  
He digs his fingers hard against her thigh, hoping to bruise, and feels her smile around his mouth.  
  
 _gilda_ , he says or he thinks, _always such a fast learner._  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He keeps her caged the way men lock their valuables away in safes and vaults, hoping that they'll never be seen or touched by anything else that could spoil them. Their secrecy. Their value. Not even air.  
  
More than part of him knows that it isn't just about Ballin. It's about Jimmy, and the ones that came before them, and the ones that were in between; it's about all of the things that she never told him, and all of the things he couldn't believe about her because she never told him. He's always needed proof, and she has never required it, never asked it, and never given it.  
  
The proof was always just her.  
  
And he blames her for that.  
  
(He's starting to figure that maybe he was always meant to stay a small man, and part of him blames her for that too.  
  
No kingdoms for a kid like him. Just castles in the sky.  
  
  
  
  
  
But Gilda?  
  
Gilda's always had the world.)  
  
  
  
  
  
The cop's wrong when he says that he loves her more than he can think straight.  
  
It isn't like that.  
  
He knows her. She knows him. He can't think of anyone else, can't look at anyone else because no one else compares. Get to lying all the time and pretty soon the only people that will look you square in the face and read you are the only people you start to trust; get to lying all the time and pretty soon you start to believe your own lies.  
  
He isn't the kind of person that can start figuring who he loves and for how much and for why. It isn't the kind of love that figures. What he knows is simple: yeah, there's something there to it - something that makes him light to anger like nothing when he sees her with someone else, something that makes him want to keep her by his side and announce to the world that she's chosen him, that that makes him something kind of special because she isn't just anyone.  
  
She's Gilda. She's made and destroyed dozens of other lives before him, and somehow, he's still here.  
  
Once, he said he hated her because that's the easy answer.  
  
The real answer is that he doesn't know. All he knows is that, whatever it is, he can't stop thinking about her, can't forget her, can't chase her out with anything; that he knows how she takes her coffee, and the way that she gets when she's nervous, and how, some days, she's too stuck in herself to even get up to make herself a sandwich; that her smile hides more than anyone could think; that he'd take the world for her if she wanted. And just for her. Even before himself.  
  
That's what's terrifying.  
  
He says he hates her, and he says he knows her, and sometimes, he says he loves her, and the fact is that he doesn't know which one is the truest statement, or if they aren't all true.  
  
The simple answer is easier.  
  
It's short.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He counts this as the third time around. Third time's the charm, if you believe in that sort of thing.  
  
He knows she does.  
  
So much of her has changed in the smallest ways that he can't get enough of looking at her as they head down the runway towards the small plane. Wrinkles around her eyes and mouth and a kind of hardened sadness that wasn't there before. Either that, or he never took care to notice it. Either answer's fair enough.  
  
She reaches out for his hand with hers and he takes it, because that's the sort of thing you do when you've agreed that this time is going to be different, that this time, everything's going to work out on the level. Straight down the line.  
  
"When we get back to New York, Johnny, what are we going to do?" she says.  
  
Her fingers are slender in his grasp and he stops, pulling her into him to kiss her. He plies her mouth open with his tongue and swallows the noise of her soft groan, his fingers splaying out across the small of her back.  
  
When he pulls away, she's grinning. In that Gilda way, shining and slippery all at once.  
  
"Not Johnny," he says, pulling her behind him as he starts walking again.  
  
She wrinkles her nose. "What do you mean?"  
  
"We're going back to New York," he says.   
  
She laughs, shaking her head. "No," she says. "I think San Francisco."  
  
He catches her profile in the low light and kisses the corner of her mouth. "Either way, it won't be Johnny Farrell."  
  
"Yeah?" she says. "Who'll it be?"  
  
"I don't know," he says. "We'll come up with something on the plane."  
  
She stumbles along behind him, and her chin knocks against his shoulder. "No past and all future?"  
  
He shrugs her off. "Something like that."  
  
  
  
  
  
It's sunny when they land in San Francisco.   
  
She's got a pair of sunglasses pushed back onto her hair, and her eyes are weary from sleeplessness. Always uneasy on flights. Another thing to learn about her.  
  
He wonders if she's already adding up the odds, taking in whatever kind of sign a sunny day is when they're in California.  
  
She reaches for his hand and presses something into his palm, small and hard.  
  
A pair of dice.  
  
"House always wins," he says.  
  
She smiles, leaning against him as they head down towards the car. "Only if you let them."


End file.
